Call for Papers: Embracing ECEC Values to Navigate an Uncertain Future

2025-02-07

Special Issue Call for Papers: Embracing ECEC Values to Navigate an Uncertain Future

Guest Editors: Denisha Jones, Defending the Early Years & Helge Wasmuth, Mercy University  

The future is unpredictable, but one thing is certain: the challenges we face today—climate change, water scarcity, natural disasters, gun violence, income inequality, racial injustice, housing unaffordability, food insecurity, and inadequate access to healthcare—will intensify as we move deeper into the 21st century. While education alone cannot solve these global issues, those of us in the field of education have a crucial role to play in fostering solutions.

Often, discussions about addressing these pressing challenges center on secondary and post-secondary education. This special issue shifts the focus to early childhood education and care (ECEC), exploring how the core values of our field can guide us in preparing for an uncertain future. Inspired by the sentiment in Robert Fulghum’s Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, this issue proposes that Everything We Need to Face the Future Comes from Our ECEC Values. In times of uncertainty, our commitment to ensuring a just and equitable early childhood experience for all children must remain steadfast. When the future threatens to reshape our world, our shared values can ground us in what all children fundamentally need and deserve.

This special issue invites ECEC educators, researchers, advocates, and activists to contribute conceptual and empirical articles that explore how a commitment to foundational ECEC values equips our field to address global challenges, both current and future. These values include:

  • Recognizing childhood as a unique, sacred phase of life that must be nurtured and protected.
  • Supporting children’s development through caring, meaningful relationships with families and caregivers.
  • Valuing children as inherently worthy of respect and care, without conditions or rewards.
  • Aligning early childhood practices and policies with research that supports healthy child development
  • Embracing play as the leading activity of development (play is learning).
  • Leveraging nature as an ideal environment for early learning and growth.
  • Centering care as fundamental to fostering healthy development in the early years.
  • Strengthening collaboration and communication between families, caregivers, and educators.
  • Celebrating diversity as a vital asset in the lives of young children.
  • Prioritizing joy, peace, love, and security as essential to thriving childhoods.

We welcome articles that address how these values can help educators, caregivers, researchers, and policymakers navigate today’s challenges and prepare for those on the horizon. Through this special issue of GER, we aim to showcase the enduring power of ECEC values to inspire hope and action in an uncertain world.

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words using a 12-point font to denishaNjones@gmail.com by March 1, 2025, and write Global Education Review in the subject line of your email. Abstracts will be reviewed for fit, and you will be informed by April 1 if the article is invited for review. Full manuscripts will be due by October 31, 2025. The issue will be published in March 2026.

Authors of articles invited for review are required to participate in a blind review of up to two articles submitted for publication in the same issue.